paper: pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

_{© Rhonna Farrer}

My name is Rhonna Farrer & I love this photo because I’m a colour addict! I adore this colourful photo! This colour display was found on the streets of Paris. Our jaws dropped at each window filled with colourful glee! Blue apples paired with green walls just took my breath away! I want to decorate a room like this in my house…so creative!

Family + Art + Teaching. This unique combination is what Rhonna enjoys most about digital scrapbooking. A wife and mother of three young children, there’s never any shortage of inspiration or creative material. As a designer in the greeting cards/gift industry, digital scrapbooking was a logical evolution for Rhonna. In 2004, she won the Creating Keepsakes Hall of Fame contest. She spent two years working as Creative Director for Digital Scrapbooking Magazine. And she worked with Two Peas in a Bucket as a Garden Girl & Digital Designer. She currently works with Heidi Swapp & Janet Hopkins at House of 3 where she designs & inspires with home decor, scrapbooking & paper products! In addition to her career as an artist, Rhonna has a degree in Art Education and has taught both nationally and internationally. You can read Rhonna’s blog here and find a multitude of projects to inspire!

Photo by NicholeV Photography

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I love this photo… is a special series of posts this week, featuring favourite images from some fabulous scrapbookers and friends. I hope you enjoy! -S.

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_{Photo mask available here, by Carina Gardner.}

One of the things that most inspired me about blogging has been something that pops up now and then called colour week. With one blogger announcing and hosting the week as it were, by posting photos from their life each with a certain colour as the focus. It sounds simple, and indeed it is, but I’ve always found it such a beautiful little peek into the things we notice every day, especially as I hopped from blog to blog to see how different the photos would be with the same colour at heart. Although it wasn’t something that I found in the circle of scrapbooking blogs, it was something that seemed like such a perfect project for a scrapbooker: taking time to document the colours of our everyday lives with photographs that could be blogged and possibly even end up in a crafty project or scrapbook page.

So this week, I hope you’re ready to pick up your camera. For each of the next seven days, we’ll focus on one colour each day. Get your camera in gear, take photos of that colour and share them with everyone if you would like! Join our Flickr group here, share photos on your blog, add them to the photography gallery at Two Peas or anywhere else you fancy. I have a little prize to give to one person each day…but I also think this is a project you might like even without the prize motivation! (But hey, prizes = fun, so there are still prizes!)

This week will be just about the photos: there will be posts with photos, about photography, and a few special guests will be stopping by to show you their favourite photographs. Next week, I promise there will be crafty goodness to coordinate, so don’t fret! (Plus that might give you time to catch up on a few of the challenges from last week!)

We start today…with the colour green. Take your camera around and see what green you can snap. Mix indoors and out, day and night if you like…and share your favourites. See what stories you find hiding in the greens of your day.

Be sure to leave a comment here with your favourite green shot or a link to your green post elsewhere. I’ll draw a name from all the comments for an 8×10 art print – entries close at the end of June, just like the other Month of Colour challenges.

Can’t wait to see everyone’s green images!

xlovesx

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Thanks so much for joining in A Month of Colour! Here’s a list of links for everything in week one, for quick reference!

Welcome to a Month of Colour (includes free photo overlay to download)
Colour Challenge 01: Scrapbook your favourite colour
A Rainbow of Scrapbook Pages
Tutorial: Customising Digital Scrapbook Page Templates
Colour Challenge 02: Using a digital template and/or rainbow border
Spin the Colour Wheel
Cracking the Colour Wheel, part one
Colour Challenge 03:” Using the spinner for your colours
A rainbow of scrapbook pages
Cracking the Colour Wheel, part two
Colour Challenge 04: Using the colour wheel
Colours of Tomorrow (favourite colour-craft reads).
Colour symbolism
Colour Challenge 05: Craft with symbolic colour
Blue Sky Thinking

All challenges end on the last day of the month so you still have plenty of time to complete any of these challenges for a chance at a prize.

And an extra little prize for today: Have you added a Month of Colour badge to your blog or message board signature, shared this link on your facebook profile, twitter, kirtsy or something like that? If you have, leave a link in the comments on this post and you’ll be entered in the drawing £10 of shopping credit at shimelle.com for classes or goodies. A Month of Colour logos are available in small, medium, large and signature bar sizes…or click any of the bookmark links below or otherwise share on your place of choice! Spread the word and comment with the link – supereasy. Entries close at the end of the month.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend—so excited for what week two has in store. Time to shake things up! See you tomorrow morning!

xlovesx

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I’ve just finished a short return to the world of teaching English to help a group get ready for their final exams and I promise I didn’t talk scrapbooking to them. But we did talk about colour—colour and its symbolism in the poems they had to study for their tests. They may have had the hard task of writing about symbolism and being graded for it…but as crafters we can just have the fun part: we can use colours as symbols, just like poets, without fear of being graded in any way. We’re making the rules, so that means we can break them too. Still, it’s interesting to think about the traditional meanings of the colours we see and use every day.

White stands for hope, innocence, surrender, peace, purity, brides, babies, communions and all things new.

Red symbolises both danger (like a warning sign) and help (like the Red Cross). It also represents both love and anger. Many cultures also identify red with happiness and prosperity. It’s one of the most dominant colours in product packaging and advertising…and it seems to have paid off rather well for Ferrari.

Green represents money to some and the environment to others. Lighter shades make us think of spring, planting and new life; darker shades look like winter pine needles. For many years it was labelled as a weak colour for advertising and rarely adopted by companies or campaigns, but in recent years eco-concerns and the success of the green branding of Starbucks Coffee, though completely unrelated, have seen this colour gain popularity in media.

Blue is a traditional colour of good luck and good health. Its richest shades were once reserved for the royalty and most wealthy, as the dyes were some of the most expensive.

Yellow has links to youth and energy on the positive side. Like red, it has some contradictions: its high visibility makes it a natural choice for warnings (rather than a care-free youth) and it commonly means someone looks rather ill (despite also aligning with energy like sunshine).

Today’s challenge is to use colour in a symbolic way on a card, layout or other craft project. Upload it before the end of the month and link it up in the comments – one lucky participant will win an art print for this challenge. Entries close at 11:59pm UK time on the 30th of June.

and….this weekend only:
Online Class Sale!!!

This weekend only, archived online classes are sale priced in the shop so you can catch a class you have missed before and access all the class materials so you can work through at your own pace. Purchase a class during the sale and you’ll receive all the details by email on or before Tuesday (9th June). This is a very rare thing in the shop, so take advantage while you can!

Happy weekend and happy colouring!

xlovesx

PS: No, I’m not too sure what is up with the dates displaying a day off. I’ll try to find a way to fix that when I am back home on Monday.

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Just packing up for GoGoGetaway, and these are the colours I’ll be seeing all day tomorrow. I’m teaching a minibook class with some of my favourite summer supplies, and lots of machine stitching. See some of you there!

While I’m packing the car, I have three colourful links to share with you:

The ABCs of Color Inspiration by Ali Edwards is a beautiful read that will remind you of all the colour that surrounds you constantly, in places you may otherwise ignore.

The Kitschy Digitals Blog is a pure explosion of colour and features paper and fabric projects in addition to digital scrapbook pages, so don’t dismiss it just because you’re not on the digi side.

Color Inspiration, a regular series of colour challenges from Kristina Werner. Kristina posts a colour combination and hundreds of crafty types play along, so the past challenges may be closed to new entries but they are still amazing inspiration, as you can click through to see what everyone made with the same colour combo.

Have a beautiful Friday and I’ll see you again this evening with today’s colour challenge!

xlovesx

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So now that were are all set with the terminology and structure of the colour wheel, today’s the day we’re going to spin the wheel into use for our pages! And of course, there’s another colour challenge to be had!

Monochromatic combinations
Super easy, even without a wheel in front of you. Pick one colour and use that same colour in lighter shades (add white) and darker shades (add black) and that’s it – no other colours. But you knew that already. That was just too easy.

Analogous combinations
Fancy name, but actually still easy. These combinations come from picking the colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel. If you pick colours that are touching, they will coordinate. Magic! Red + yellow and blue + green are both analogous combinations.

Complementary combinations
This one at least has a name that makes sense. Pick a point on the colour wheel and draw a straight line across to the other side of the wheel: those are complementary colours. They will always coordinate too – magic yet again. Many school or team colour combinations are complementary: blue + orange, violet + yellow…and also the very Christmassy red + green. This layout uses the complementary combo.

Split complementary combinations
If analogous colours and complementary colours had a baby, the baby would be split complementary colours. Or maybe that’s not scientifically viable. Pick a colour on the wheel. Now draw a line straight across, just like you did with complementary. Except instead of just two colours, pick the colours either side of the complementary – hence the split. Violet + yellow green + yellow orange = split complementary. Blue + red orange + yellow orange = split complementary.

Want to see all of these (and a few more) illustrated on your screen? Choose a colour here and presto! magico!

Although there are many more ways to make combinations, these four are pretty magical indeed and they can get you through at least an album’s worth of pages before you start repeating combinations. So this is where we’ll start for now…after all, it’s only week one of colour week!

Today’s colour challenge: use the colour wheel and one of these combinations to choose the colours for your next crafty project. Share it online and link it up in the comments on this post. One lucky commenter will be win a place in Learn Something New Every Day, an online class that runs throughout September. Entries close at 11:59pm on the 30th of June!

Happy scrapping!

xlovesx

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...click any layout to see larger

A little rainbow of beautiful pages this morning – to wish you a beautiful day!

xlovesx

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_{Supplies: Bazzill cardstock, Scenic Route paper, Prima trim (both the paper + trim are non-current, sorry!), tree stamp from Colorbok.}

So that colour combination I got on the spinner this morning? Here’s what it looks like on paper. Hoping to get a chance to work with these colours with a bit more detail on a layout soon.

But of course, now it’s your turn!

The third challenge of the month: make something with a three-colour combination that pops up when you spin the colour wheel here. Get it online somewhere and link it up in the comments so you have a chance to win: the winner of this challenge gets a set of letter stamps! Same drill as normal—you have all month to complete the challenge and entries close at 11:59pm on the 30th of June 2009.

You can make whatever you fancy…a scrapbook page, a card, a quilt, a cupcake…ready, steady, GO!

xlovesx

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